371: Want Passive Income From Your Blog? Here’s What to Focus On

[00:00:00] If you've ever wondered how to turn your blog traffic into passive income where you've heard people talk about ad revenue, but it really feels millions of miles away this episode's for you, we're diving into the strategies that actually get you to the traffic you need to monetize. Welcome to the Thrive Podcast, where we believe creators deserve more.

[00:00:24] More money, more freedom, and even more love for what they do. I'm Bree P, your coach for content creators. And I know the struggle, the long hours, the endless ideas, the feeling that success is just out of reach. But here's the truth. You've got what it takes, and this podcast, it's your shortcut to getting there from strategies that actually work to behind the scenes insights.

[00:00:50] We are unlocking your potential one episode at a time. So if you're ready to turn your creative hustle into a thriving business, let's get started.

[00:01:04] Back in July, we started a series in episode 360 4, all about growing your audience. There are seven episodes in that series, so I highly encourage you to go back and binge through all of them or just pick the platforms that mean the most to you, and you're going to pair them with this new series that we're starting today all about monetization.

[00:01:30] This is episode one of the series all about monetizing your content, and it was inspired by our monetization growth plans inside of Bold Fluence. We have built over 25 unique growth path combinations to help you make more money and grow your audience in a way that works for you. So what you're going to do is you're going to take one of those episodes all about growing your audience.

[00:01:55] And pair it with one of these new episodes in this series on monetization growth. When you join Bold Fluence, we'll walk you through those options and help you choose the audience growth and monetization path that feels best for your goals. And this episode is a behind the scenes peak at what that looks like.

[00:02:13] So today we are starting this series talking about website advertising and why this is a smart long-term play. It's passive income. Once you're set up, that is what we love about it. Your blog posts will keep working for you year after year, after year. That is the key though, is that we have to get things set up, established and starting to run, and that does take time.

[00:02:41] What I love about, let's say, an old school blog is that there are blogs out there that started publishing years and years ago that are still making money to this day. There's nothing else that we can really, truly say that about. Maybe some old YouTube videos. Yes, perhaps, but nothing really from social media.

[00:03:01] Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, nothing like that because in reality, blogs existed before those became a thing. But imagine if while you're running something on social media, you're also building something. In the background, even on your blog where you're taking that content, turning it into really optimized posts that are going to drive traffic for you.

[00:03:25] If you've ever felt like, you know what? What is the end game here? At some point, I'm going to be tired of doing social media. That's why we're talking about website advertising with a blog today. Ad revenue is a smart long-term play because it scales. The more traffic you get, the more income you're going to make without doing any more work, and it gives your content a second life and a second job of educating and earning.

[00:03:51] So what do you need to get started? There are some traffic thresholds that you need to hit in order to get on one of the, let's say. Quote, unquote, big players in the ad revenue game for blogs, those are media, vine, and riv. So Mediavine and riv are the hubs that run ads on your blog, on your website, and you have to have certain amount of page views or sessions in order to qualify with one of these programs to be able to run ads on your blog.

[00:04:26] So within Mediavine, there is a growth program where you can qualify if you have 10,000 pages views a month. So it's a great way to get introduced to it. You're not going to make a ton of money, but you'll make some passive income and you might as well do that while you're growing your block. So I recommend if you're getting close to that, that you definitely join.

[00:04:49] What you want to aim for though, is higher than that in order to start making more of a substantial income. In order to qualify for Media vin's main program, you need to have 50,000 sessions a month, and I encourage you as soon as you get close, to ask everyone you know to share your blog for you, and then immediately go and apply as soon as you hit those numbers.

[00:05:15] The qualifier for RIV is 100,000 page views, not sessions. Surprisingly, if you are getting 50,000 sessions a month, you're not going to be too far off of a hundred thousand page views for riv. Both of these programs have different pros and cons. I've helped people switch back and forth between the two and it's very interesting and honestly very unique to which one people like.

[00:05:43] So I'll leave that up to you, but those are some numbers to kind of set as milestones for yourself. In order to start getting advertisement on your blog. So a blog with consistent content, niche clarity, and optimized categories is what you're going to need to get started in order to start scaling. You can't just open up a website, start blogging about this, that and the other.

[00:06:10] You have to really be strategic when you're getting started with this. A lot of people will look at blogs and be like, oh, well this person is blogging about everything under the sun. Why can't I do that? What I always remind people is that they didn't get to where they are today by posting about everything under the sun.

[00:06:31] They had a niche and they worked really, really hard at it, and then once they got to a certain point, they were able to expand their content pillars. So that's what you need to keep in mind your. A beginner, and so you have to figure out what is my lane? Where can I get the page for you? You also wanna make sure that you have a clean website structure, a fast loading time, and user friendly design.

[00:06:55] Fortunately, with everything out there right now, most of those things are pretty easy. Most themes are going to help you have a very user friendly design and a clean website structure. It's just paying attention to that and making sure you're not going and purchasing a theme that is super, super cheap.

[00:07:13] Um, I'm talking, you know, like 10, 15, $20 because it's probably not going to have the user friendliness or the structure that you're needing. So expect to spend a little bit more, and I'm talking anywhere from 50 to $120 is completely fine to get you something that is going to work a bit more and serve you longer.

[00:07:37] So once we have it all set up, how do we drive traffic to our blog setting those goals of hitting 50,000 sessions a month or 10,000 pages, right? We've gotta be strategic in driving that traffic. So you want to prioritize Evergreen and SEO Rich Posts. Evergreen posts are ones that are going to perform year after year after year.

[00:07:58] So there is Evergreen and then there is seasonal evergreen. I think both of them are 10 out of 10 and that it's great to incorporate both depending on what your niche is. Evergreen posts are ones where you can post it today, and it is still going to be relevant next year at this time or next year in January, or in six months from now, nine months from now.

[00:08:21] Right. It's relevant at any point in time, and it is something that people are going to be searching for for years to come and at any point in the year. Seasonal evergreen content is just that where it is. Think like your fall posts, right? Those are only going to be popular in the fall time. Nobody is going to necessarily be searching for a pumpkin recipe in February, right?

[00:08:47] So it is seasonal, evergreen, that stuff. Those posts are really, really great because they will keep performing year after year as long as they are. Done correctly with the correct SEO and the correct content, they're gonna perform really well for you year after year and give you boosts in traffic every single year, and we love that Pinterest and email can also help supplement traffic.

[00:09:12] Um, and Pinterest can send so much traffic to your website. So if website advertising is a long-term game plan for you, you need to be investing your time into Pinterest. Learning how to do that correctly. I have a Pinterest workshop that I highly recommend, and we will link that in the show notes for you guys.

[00:09:32] SEO is the long game. You need to know how to do SEO and that relates to. Both Pinterest and SEO for Google. What's also interesting is we're starting to see SEOed posts showing up in ai. So in tools like Bard or like Chat GBT searches are pulling from any content that is done really, really well with SEO.

[00:10:00] So you have to learn how to do that, and I'll tell you how to get started with that in just a minute. But I first wanna address some common roadblocks and how to navigate those. So the first one is not knowing what content drives traffic. Right? That's the biggest issue. Like, okay, Brie, well I have this idea for a blog post, um, but how do I know that this is actually going to get traffic?

[00:10:21] How do I know that this is worth my time? And the solution for that is that SEO keyword research, you have to. Dive into some data, you have to do some research and figure that out. It is not something that is just going to like be a gut instinct, although sometimes our guts are very instinctual when it comes to these things, and we know what is going to be trending.

[00:10:46] It is not going to be as effective as when you sit down and do some research on keywords, and then make sure that you have applied those correctly within your blog posts and then also within your pins for Pinterest. The other roadblock that we're seeing constantly is that inconsistent posting and giving up too early.

[00:11:06] And this is hard because it is a long-term gain and it is not something that typically gives you, um, that instant satisfaction, that hit of dopamine. Right? It is not going to do that like social media does for us. It is something that takes longer. And because of that, when we don't have that reward hitting us from an outside source, it's really easy to drop it or say, this isn't working, and I'm, I'm not gonna go do this.

[00:11:37] I'm gonna go do something else. But I can guarantee you that if you do it correctly and if you stick with it long term, it will pay off for you. And I really do think that having a blog. A really good retirement concept because again, when it comes to social media, you have to keep hustling. You have to keep creating content.

[00:12:01] Once you get a blog that is fully functioning and running and driving traffic to you in your sleep, you are able to slow way back with how much content you're producing. I'm working with a client right now whose blog is producing page views for her month after month after month, and she is seeing ad revenue from it every single month, and she has not posted a blog post since the beginning of last year.

[00:12:26] Wild. Now we're revising her strategy and starting to add new blog posts because we wanna bump those numbers up, but that is just how amazing it actually can be. As you can see, money coming in without touching it for over a year. I don't recommend it, but it is possible. Another common issue that we see is a low RPM, so that means that you are just getting some traffic, but you're getting paid a very little amount for them.

[00:12:56] This could be happening if you're sending a majority of your traffic from social media, if your content is irrelevant or it is not linking to each other and not giving your audience, you know, the correct information. More like bait and switch type of content. So those are different things to keep an eye on.

[00:13:14] And I mentioned the social media because a lot of content creators, and I was seeing this a lot in TikTok back in let's say 20 20, 20 21. A lot of content creators were getting huge page views on their blog because they were sending them there from TikTok. However, they were only landing on that one first page, so kind of like a link tree situation, right, where you just land on one page with some buttons and then they were clicking immediately off.

[00:13:44] That is not going to allow any ads to pop up. To be seen, which means if nobody is seeing the ads, these companies are not able to pay you money, right? You may hit the page views, you may hit a hundred thousand page views, 50,000 sessions for Mediavine, however. It is not going to end up paying you out, and you may not qualify.

[00:14:06] If all of your page views are just from one social media account. You need to have traffic from Google, from Pinterest, from multiple sources, not just a viral post on social media. So what does a. Growth plan look like? Well, just like we did with the audience growth plans, we're sharing what a 90 day growth plan can look like for each of these different monetization streams that we're gonna be talking about over the next four weeks.

[00:14:39] This is high level and how you get the in depth. The full strategy of this is inside bold fluence, which I'll tell you about here in just a minute. So within those first 90 days in the first month, you're going to lay that foundation like we talked about. You want to audit your blog layout and speed. You want to identify three core blog categories and outline new SEO based blog posts.

[00:15:03] Then in month two, we're gonna focus on growing your traffic strategically. So that looks like batching and publishing optimized blog posts weekly. And we create a system for you so that way you know, if weekly feels like a lot to you right now, we're gonna walk you through how to create something that is a system that works really well for you.

[00:15:24] So you can more so batch your content and batch the tasks. That way you can work quicker and not waste time. So you're gonna batch and optimize those blog posts weekly and create pins for each post and set up Google Analytics to track performance. Then in the last month, we're going to monetize and measure, so tracking your sessions, optimizing your top posts with internal links, and call to actions.

[00:15:50] If you can begin to apply to ad networks when you meet that threshold. So depending on where you're at, whenever we start working with you or whenever you start working on this plan, once you hit that 10,000 sessions, we advise that you go and immediately apply to Media Vine Grow. That is the one where you only have to have 10,000 pages, and so that is the first way to get familiar with ads and to start making a little bit of money.

[00:16:15] And just remember, the blog post that you write today can be making you money two years from now. And beyond that is the power of ad revenue. So some mistakes to avoid would be only bribing personal updates instead of searchable high traffic content, not checking your analytics or not installing them at all.

[00:16:36] If you don't have Google Analytics installed, go and do that this week. Another mistake is waiting until your blog is perfect before publishing consistently. It does not have to be perfect. You go and scroll back, even just on your phone and look like, look at old photos that you had taken years and years ago.

[00:16:55] You've improved, right? Different things have changed. It's going to take time and it's never going to be perfect. You just have to start. And the final mistake that you must avoid is ignoring SEO in favor of what is trending on social media. So how does Bold Fluence help you get to Mediavine? Get to iv?

[00:17:17] We help you figure out blog post templates, keyword research walkthroughs and title plug and plays. We give you coaching and feedback on your content plan and blog structure and. Content planning support because it can get really overwhelming whenever it's just all on you. Plus you get a community of other bloggers that are also working towards ad income goals to compare strategies with and to support and encourage each other ads.

[00:17:45] You're on this journey, and you know what? Ad revenue doesn't happen overnight, but with the right plan and support, it does happen. Inside bullet wounds, we help you build a blog that works for you long term with coaching templates and strategies that actually move the needle. So if you're ready to turn your page views into Profit, head to Thrive Together, blog slash bold fluence, and let's grow your ad revenue together.

[00:18:13] If this episode helped you help us grow, leave a review, share it with a friend, and tag us on social media. We can't wait to cheer you on.